Last week, at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, President Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter put partisanship aside and descended on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas to say nice things about our 43rd president, (They’re all in the same racket, after all.)

At 226,560 square feet and a cost of $250 million, the Bush Presidential Center is the biggest and most expensive yet of the 13 presidential libraries that one scholar has derisively called “America’s Pyramids.”

One of the key exhibits at the Bush megalith is Decision Points Theater, a virtual Situation Room wherein visitors can “consult” video advisers and make their own calls on some of the “Decider’s” key decisions, like war with Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and bailing out the banks.

As Bush put it in an interview with CNN’s John King, “hopefully, people will go to the Decision Points Theater and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t understand that’ or ‘I now understand it better.’ ”

In Decision Points Theater, if you decide not to go to war with Iraq, “43” himself comes onscreen to tell you flatly that you’re wrong: “Saddam posed too big a risk to ignore. … The world was made safer by his removal.” Bush is entitled to his own spin on the decisions he made, but he should burnish his legacy on his own dime.

Though the libraries’ construction is privately funded, they’re managed by the National Archives and Records Administration, using federal tax dollars.

Last year, it cost the American taxpayer some $75 million to keep them open.

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http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/30/no-more-tax-dollars-for-presidential-lib